Watch Them Flicker
by Calculated Artificiality
Summary: When they get back together in Season 1, Rayna and Deacon have a serious conversation about all those years they spent apart - and what truths those years taught them.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: Gentle reminder that every story I write leads to an AU where recent 'events' don't happen._

 _Lyn - thank you so much for your review on_ I'm Not Here to Be Brave _. I hope your surgery went well, and that you heal swiftly and wholly._

* * *

Deacon is sitting on her couch, his head pressed firmly into the back of it, the TV playing softly in the background. _Breakfast at Tiffany's_ is on; it's her favorite movie, and she can never turn it off when it's playing. He's watched it with her—and without her, when he wanted to hold on to her memory—so many times it's become one of his favorites, too.

 _You mustn't give your heart to a wild thing_ , Deacon thinks, shaking his head as he turns to look at her. _As though that ship didn't set sail the moment he ever laid eyes on her._ The truth is that he hasn't seen hide nor hair of his heart since that first night at the Bluebird when he saw her, all fiery hair and eyes to match; she was the wildest thing he'd ever seen, and he'd handed his heart, scar tissue and all, over to her without a second thought—though, he thinks now, he didn't have much of a choice. He never had much of a choice when it came to loving her.

Rayna is staring right back at him, her eyes holding something he can only name as awe. She's wearing one of his old t-shirts he didn't even know she still had and a pair of flannel pajama pants, and he feels the awe creep into his veins, too, feels it coursing through his body until he's not sure it's blood that's flowing through them at all.

He can't believe he gets to see her like this again, that she is _his_ again after all these years. They haven't talked about anything since they got back together, not really, and suddenly he wants her to _know_ where he's been all these years. He wants her to see the roads he walked down alone, scared to face a lifetime never having her again the way he wanted to. The way he needed to.

He reaches out and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. He runs his index finger down the shell of it before bringing his hand back to rest in his lap. "These past years, Ray—these years without you, they weren't easy on me." He clears his throat, "When you left me, it wasn't easy on me."

He thinks about how much he wanted to die back then, how much time he spent imagining his own end, and he knows he can't tell her about those roads. He can never tell her that he saw his wrist as a bullseye for the first two years she was gone. He can never tell her about the pills he kept for months in his cabinet, how they taunted him every time he got his toothpaste out. He can never tell her how he got the pills out from behind a package of band-aids on the night he found out she was pregnant and counted them over and over again, trying to figure out if he had enough, trying to decide how many he had to take to get the job done and minimize the mess. The only thing that stopped him that night was the idea that she would be the one to find him, that she would somehow come over to his apartment and find him dead, just like she always feared she would. He couldn't do that to her, but he can't tell her that. Anytime he thought about it after that night—and it was way more than he ever wanted to admit to anyone, even himself—he thought about Rayna cleaning up another one of his messes, and that was enough.

"I know," She whispers, and he wonders if maybe she does; she's always guessed his darkest secrets, after all. Her voice is small, and she smiles a bit before she makes the confession. "It wasn't easy for me, either." She sighs, "Deacon, after we broke up, I used to lay in bed night after night imagining I was a paper doll."

Deacon furrows his brow, confused by her admission, "A paper doll?"

She nods, "Yes. And I'd think of future lovers," Deacon blanches at her word, but she continues "I'd think about how someday, one of them would come along and say 'show me where he hurt you.' And I'd have to point out every inch of my body, because _everything_ hurt so much without you." She turns her head and stares at the TV where Holly Golightly is wearing a cat mask, "Sometimes it felt like you just lit a match and I went right up in flames." She clears her throat, and her voice is raspy when she speaks again, thick with emotion, "Sometimes I wondered how there was anything left of me at all. People would look at me… Bucky, Tandy, even Daddy, and I'd think _how can you not see that I'm just a pile of ash_?"

"I get that." His voice is heavy, and he _does_ get it, more than most could. Back then, when she was a pile of ash, he was a used match: just a stick of wood without a purpose, and a burnt spot that used to work. Someone had used him up, and he'd never be able to set anything on fire again; somedays back then he swore he could smell the sulfur stuck in his nose.

She smiles sadly, "Then I'd think that these lovers would never ask me to show them where you'd loved me. And I'd think _thank god,_ because I'd have to do the same damn thing. I'd have to point out every inch of my body." Her voice is a whisper, laden with the weight of carrying this around all these years, but she doesn't say what _else_ she thought back then: _I'd have to rip out my heart and show it to them, saying 'here—here is where he loved me, and I'm sorry, but you can't touch it, because it's still his.'_

Deacon feels his heart in his chest, it's stuttering a bit, and he doesn't want to ask, but he feels the sudden desperate need to know, " _Did_ you ever talk about me?"

She rolls her head back on to the couch, tearing her eyes away from the TV, focusing them on him, "With a lover?" She asks, her voice gentle.

Deacon nods once, "Yes, with a _lover_." He grits the word out, the taste of it bitter in his mouth. He doesn't expect it to hurt so much, but is not surprised to find that it _does_. He's holding his breath waiting for her to answer.

"Deacon," She turns to face him, bringing her hand up to cup his face; the look she gives him is one he can't place, somewhere between sadness and incredulity, like she can't believe he doesn't already know the answer to the question he just asked, "I've never _had_ another lover." She breathes it out, and it's the sweetest phrase he's ever heard.

His breath hitches in his throat, and his eyes feel suddenly wet as he releases the breath, letting it work its way into the space between them. He knows exactly what she means, and it's everything he wanted to hear, but never thought he would.

She thinks she should feel embarrassed admitting she spent fourteen years with another man in her bed and didn't love him, not for a second. But Deacon's looking at her like she just handed him a life-jacket and he hadn't even realized he'd been drowning, so she can only feel relieved. _She_ hadn't realized the weight of that truth had been perched on her shoulders all these years.

"I've only ever loved _you_." She says, and she's amazed she's not crying, but she runs her hand along the stubble of his chin, marveling at how it still feels the exact same underneath her fingers as it did the first time she ever did it.

Deacon closes his eyes and he thinks for a moment of the women who cycled in and out of his bed through the years, how he never talked to them about Rayna, but how they all somehow still _knew_ —how sometimes her name would fall from his lips, and they'd both pretend that it hadn't. How he couldn't love any of them, how he never even tried, how he never even _wanted_ to.

He can love _no one_ but her. He knows this now, he stopped fighting it a long time ago. He will _never_ love anyone but her; should the sun burn out, should the rest of the stars implode, should everything in the universe suddenly disappear, he knows his love for her would remain. His love for her has kept vigil; his love for her will _always_ keep vigil.

"I've only ever loved _you_ , baby." He whispers, and it's a promise. _He only ever will_.

She smiles, and he adjusts himself on the couch so he's closer to her, their knees touching.

There's something else he hasn't told her, not really, and he wants her to know, "I loved watching your success." He says, "If I couldn't be here," He places his hand on her knee, "Like I wanted to, if I couldn't be _with_ you… I'm glad I got to be with you on stage."

She smiles, and takes his hand in hers and then she presses it against her heart, "You were _here_ , too. You were always here." She leans forward and presses a kiss to his lips, "I wouldn't have any of it if it weren't for you." At his look, she smiles, then glances at the TV, "Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot." She laughs; she's no Holly Golightly, but it's true—whenever she looked in the mirror and couldn't see the girl she was when she started her journey, she just had to look at Deacon. She knew _he saw her_.

Deacon shakes his head, " _I_ owe _you_." He whispers against her lips, because she saved his life even when she didn't know it was in danger. The thought of her kept him sober, kept him grounded, kept him _alive_.

Their lips come together like a vow: _they can love only each other._

He pulls back to look at her, overwhelmed, and then he presses his lips to hers again. He opens his mouth against hers as she kisses him back and it feels like the stars are imploding. He runs his hand up the hem of her shirt, his tongue gliding over hers. She sucks in her breath at the feel of his rough hands on the soft skin of her stomach, inhales against his mouth as his hand creeps lower, dipping into the top of her sweatpants, reaching lower, lower.

As his fingers glide against her, he sets her on fire, but it's a different kind this time.


	2. Chapter 2

They're still on the couch, sated, side by side, their naked bodies flush against one another. The movie has started over again, and they're both staring at the screen, Rayna's hands trailing lightly over Deacon's sternum, her fingernails scratching the skin there. He closes his eyes and lets out a contented sigh, concentrating on the feel of her skin against his. Her caress feels nice, a creature comfort he hadn't allowed himself to imagine in well over a decade.

In the too many years they'd spent apart, he imagined kissing her, he imagined angling her against a wall and slipping inside of her, feeling her warmth envelop him as he moved against her with his mouth buried against her neck licking and sucking at the oddly sweet skin over her pulse point. _Nothing very bad could ever happen there._

He never allowed himself to imagine _this_ , the after part, the lying next to each other in bliss part; somehow he knew he couldn't handle imagining the intimacy of it—of what he knew could only ever have with her and no one else. He couldn't bring himself to think about what he had actually lost: her face an hour after she came, the way she sleepily burrowed her head into his neck and her breath fell hot against him as she placed lazy open mouthed kisses to his skin.

He could imagine her in ecstasy, he could imagine her writhing underneath him, on top of him, next to him, even on her hands and knees in front of him, but he couldn't imagine her quiet love for him, the still moments between them after the ache and blazing hunger for one another had coasted back down to embers. It had always been his favorite part with her, the after part. And _that_ gaping loss is what he could never face; it was those embers he nursed, kept ever-present, refused to let stop smoldering.

Paul Varjak is on the screen, now— _no, no, it's Paul-baby._ He's saying, and Deacon lets out a small huff of air, somewhere between a scoff and a laugh.

Deacon watched this movie the night she left, the night he knew she was really gone and that she wasn't coming back, not this time, not ever. He saw himself more than ever in Paul that night, cried himself deep into a fifth of whiskey, and called her cell phone. He imagined her Nokia ringing that strangely sad descending tone, and willed her to pick up, knowing she wouldn't. He slurred the words through the phone into her voicemail: _Baby, come back. I'll be whoever you want me to be_.

When Rayna heard the message the next day, Moon River was playing in the background as his voice carried down the line, sounding so distant yet so close and she almost called him back; her fingers hovered above the dial pad, she pressed four numbers, but couldn't make her hand stop quaking long enough to get through the others. So she listened to it again, and she almost ran back to their apartment and grabbed him by the face. She imagined placing her palms on the side of his face like whispers: _I only want_ you _, Deacon, whoever you are._ Because it was the truth, and it would always be the truth. She'd never stop wanting him. But the slur in his words kept her away. The slur in his words sent her back to Tandy's, where everything was an awful shade of cream, and music never played. It sent her back to Tandy's, where she shut herself in the spare room and listed to the message over and over and over again. She kept it with her for eight years, transferring it from phone to phone to phone; it eventually got lost somehow, irretrievable, like so many other things between them back then.

The party in Holly's apartment rages on, and Rayna brings her knee up to drape it over Deacon's hips. He grabs her knee and holds on to it, his fingers brushing over the sensitive skin behind it, eliciting a sigh from her lips.

Her voice is still hazy from sex, "Sometimes I still _miss_ our first apartment together." She places a kiss to his chest, "That tiny little place on Olive."

Deacon chuckles, shaking his head a bit, "Rayna, that place was a shithole." He misses it, too. He misses who they were back then, too; who they were during the good times, at least.

Rayna smiles, remembering the hairline cracks in the walls, the chipped paint, the half-completed crown moulding, the way the water heater would groan to a very sporadic life for every lukewarm shower together, leaving them to create a very different kind of heat, the hole in the bedroom wall from where their hand-me-down headboard knocked against it just a _little too hard_."I know, but it was _our_ shithole." She laughs, "I fell in love with you in that apartment."

Deacon's thumb traces a pattern over her kneecap, "No, you didn't."

"Oh, I didn't?" She smirks at him, "Where did I fall in love with you, then?"

"In this lifetime?" He asks, his voice suddenly serious, "Or all the others?" His thumb on her kneecap stills, "In _this_ lifetime, it was the Bluebird. First time we met."

"Is that right?" Her voice is coated with emotion, and he knows she's thinking about the first time they laid eyes on one another, the string lights in the Bluebird providing the perfect backdrop for their meet-cute.

Deacon nods, "It is."

"Okay," She agrees around a smile, knowing that he is right, "But I fell in _desperate_ love with you in that apartment."

"Desperate?" Deacon asks, smiling when she nods against him.

A hush falls between them until Rayna's fingers tap his chest lightly, "Did I ever tell you that I finally read the book?" She nods her head towards the TV.

Deacon glances down at her, his hand finding her hair and sliding itself through it; he thinks about it. "No," He shakes his head, realizing that she never did tell him that. The realization brings with it a sudden sense of melancholy. It washes over him.

In the painful years that have stretched between them, he supposes they didn't do a lot of actual talking. He knows her like he knows the back of his hand; he always has, even when the back of _her_ hand got a new shiny accessory that didn't come from him. But, there were still things they didn't talk about from their life together, things they couldn't talk about if she was to remain someone else's wife and he was to remain _not_ an adulterer. _Breakfast at Tiffany's_ , he realizes, was one of those things.

She smiles up at him, and the melancholy disappears—they are lovers _now_ , they are talking _now_. She is no one's wife anymore; he can love her without the guilt rippling his stomach, threatening to rot it from the inside out.

"Well, I did. I finally read it." She says, adjusting her head so her lips are against his neck. She inhales against him, smelling the scent of his cologne mixed with the scent that has always been Deacon, the one that would make her stomach lurch with excited nerves any time she smelled it—for a decade, it was followed by a crushing disappointment.

Deacon taps her knee once with his thumb, "And?"

"I liked it, but…" She shrugs, "It's sadder than the movie."

Deacon sighs, "Most things are."

She leans her head back and looks at him, quirking her head to the right head in a silent question.

"Sadder than the movies." He clarifies, leaning forward to press his lips against her hairline. He inhales, letting the sweet scent of her hair fill his lungs.

"Oh," She lays her head down on his chest, "Yeah."

She looks back up at him, opens her mouth to speak, but closes it again.

"What?" He asks, raising his eyebrows at her.

Rayna's eyes trace the creases in his forehead before they settle on his eyes, the same haunted ones she fell into all those years ago, "You're different."

He nods, "So are you."

She smiles, "I like it."

His hand traces down her slender calf, "Me, too."

Silence settles between them, and they welcome it like an old friend. It's been years since silence hasn't unnerved them, hasn't made one rush to fill it with some quip about the weather, about a song, about Bucky, about anything but the unchanged truth: _I love you now, I loved you then, I'll never_ not _love you, really._

"How come you never…" Rayna's looking at the TV, and he knows exactly what she's asking just as well as he knows that she already knows the answer, but he has to make her say it.

"How come I never… what?" His voice is gentle, quiet.

"Settled down," She says, though she finds that even now, with his arms around her, her core still throbbing from him thrusting into her, the words feel too heavy on her tongue; she knows it's because they don't belong there, not when she was talking about Deacon and anyone but herself.

"Rayna…" Deacon says, taking his hand from her knee and running it down his face, "Seriously?" His tone is only slightly incredulous as he looks at her pointedly.

She sighs, dotting his chest with her index finger, dropping her gaze to watch her fingers work, "I wanted you to be happy."

Deacon guffaws, "I see you're still top banana in the shock department."

Rayna lightly slaps his chest and rolls her eyes, but she props herself up on her elbow to look at him, "I _did_."

Deacon's jaw tightens, and he can't help the words that tumble from his mouth, though he's not actually sure he would stop them even if he could, "Like you were, with Teddy?"

Rayna's eyes narrow slightly, "I _was_ happy with him for awhile," She watches as Deacon winces, "Not happy like I was with you, of course." She smooths her hand over his jaw, his stubble rough underneath her fingers, "But for a little while, I was." She tilts her head, considering him, "But you… every time a girlfriend…" Rayna trails off, shaking her head a bit as she realizes how hard that word still is for her to say, despite everything, "Got too close to you, you pushed her away."

Deacon smiles like it's the first time he's ever heard that; like Coleman didn't ream him for it every chance he got, like he didn't get called out for it at every fucking meeting, "Did I?"

Rayna drops her head back onto the cushion behind her, "You know you did. I watched you." Her voice is sad, "For years, I watched you build all these walls to keep everyone out."

Deacon's smile disappears, and he rolls his head to the side to look at her, "You really don't get it, do you?" His eyes cloud over with something vaguely dark, "I didn't build walls to keep everyone out."

"You did."

Deacon shakes his head, "No, baby, I built the walls to _keep_ _you in_."

Rayna feels the emotion surge through her body, traveling through her veins until she can feel it in every single part of herself. Her eyes water, and she swipes at her tears as her heart swells with understanding. He kept everyone away—he kept everyone out so _he could hold on to her_.

"I did it for you, you know." Rayna doesn't need to ask; she knows what he means, knows he finally stopped looking for what he thought he'd lost in the bottom of a bottle because he'd lost her, because he hoped to get her back, "I'm not supposed to say that, but it's true. I did it for you."

She lets a beat pass, "I know." She whispers, her eyes staring at the plane of his face. "We belong to each other."

He looks at her out of the corner of his eye for a long moment, and then he grins, "Is that a fact?"

She leans forward and slips her tongue into his mouth, kissing him until they're both breathless. When she finally pulls away, she's panting, but her eyes are shining, " _Life's_ a fact."

"Baby," He rasps in awe, and then his hand traces a slow path up her thigh, over her abdomen, until it lands on her breast, the soft flesh warm underneath his thick palm, "I love you. God, how I've loved you."

He dips his head to kiss her, and he swears he smells sulfur, swears he feels her skin heat right under his touch. As his hands explore her body, she feels her heart swell, feels it aching so sweetly in her chest and Rayna smiles; _This,_ she thinks, _This is where he loved me._


End file.
